March 3rd, 2014
Many thanks to all enthusiasts on 23 and 13 cm, who spent up to 20 minutes to complete a QSO with me. Tropo conditions were not too good this time and especially 2320 MHz it seemed to have an additional attenuation on all signals. But never the less, quite a lot of QSOs filled the log. More stations than I could handle, requested skeds via the ON4KST chat. I have to apologize for all my replies like “pse qrx, meep u when free”, I forgot about. So, all I can say is:
Please excuse me for forgetting to meep you!
Indeed, this chat is a great tool, I don´t want to miss it. But in times of contest it can be a challenge, like the contest itself. I will not apply for to do without, it is rather a question, how to use it. The amount of information, flowing over the screen, is immense. On saturday afternoon or on sunday morning, relevant entries might disappear within less than a minute. So I have to think about optimizing my software tools.
QSOs on 1296 MHz
Skilled VHF Operators may smile, when I tell them, 58 QSOs on 23 cm and 19 QSOs on 13 cm are hard work. The sum of that is the number they work within the first hour of their contest section. But in fact, the world above 1 GHz is a different one. The beams of the antennas are much narrower compared to VHF and UHF. The dense of stations is much less, since it is not like plug and play to become QRV up there. The attenuation increases GHz by GHz and all that results in real work for most of the QSOs. There are only a few big guns on 23 cm to be heard from any antenna direction. So the band seems to be empty, even at contest time. But the chat is an oppotunity for all kind of stations to arrange skeds and to have QSOs over distances of several hundred kilometers. And, especially when using aircraft scatter, patience could be needed to complete.
QSOs on 2320 MHz
The claimed score is a little more than 30.000 points and a new personal record as well. The 82 Stations, worked on 1296 MHz, are from 12 DXCC countries and located in 41 different grid squares. Countries worked were 40 x DL, 1 x F, 3 x G, 2 x HB9, 1 x HA, 5 x I, 6 x OE, 14 x OK, 1 x OM, 1 x ON, 5 x PA and 3 x S5. In most of the QSOs aircraft scatter was an important factor. 35 contacts were done in CW. ODX, as usual, was HG7F over 817 km, still my ODX via AS. Nice was to work 3 OE5-stations around local midnight within 10 minutes: OE5VRL/5, OE5JFL and OE5RBO.
